February 19, 2015

Guest post by Tim.Dreamt Monday 9 Feb: On holiday with family and cats.
Staying in beachside house. Sea levels rise overnight due to some kind of
lunar/tidal anomaly. Woke to find house surrounded by water. Outside orca
frolic and chase stingrays. Seems very menacing to me but children delighted
and determined to jump in water to join in fun. I frantically run around
stopping one from leaping out window into sea, only for another to escape and
find new way to jump into water. Pedro (cat) somehow leaps into water too and
also in danger of being eaten by orca.

The above is part of the
raw data I gathered while following the experimental method outlined in the
book An Experiment withTimeby J. W. Dunne. It was a bestseller at the time of publication
(1927) and ran into many editions, but had fallen into obscurity by the time I
came across it eighty-something years later in the basement of the Central
City Library. In this little book Dunne writes about time and human perception
of it, and his theory that we sometimes catch glimpses of the future when we
dream. His experiment basically asks the reader to record their dreams every
night, and to study them and note any similarities between them and subsequent
waking events.

Dunne was a very practical man apparently -- an aircraft
engineer in the very early days of the field -- and goes to great pains to let us
know that he is not interested in anything that cannot be explained rationally. "This is not a book about 'occultism', and not a book about what is
called 'psycho-analysis'" he writes as soon as we get started. And it
is interesting that he chose those two terms, too, because the crux of his
argument rests upon the relationship between dreams and precognition. Keep
clear, followers of Freud and Madame Blavatsky.

He writes in a friendly, professorial way that makes his
theories seem so reasonable. And then he throws in some time-jargon such
as: "the serialism of the fields of presentation involves the
existence of a serial observer. In this respect every time-travelling field is
the field apparent to a similarly travelling and similarly dimensioned
observer. Observation by any such observer is observation by all observers
pertaining to the dimensionally larger fields." Get it? Sort of. And
then, with diagrams and algebraic terms he outlines some convincing-looking
ideas of time and multi-dimensional space and perception, and proves
that we can all see the future in our dreams.

It all seems so convincing that when he describes his own personal
experiences with prophetic dreams (like the time he dreamt of being on a
volcanic island and being aware that it would erupt and kill 4000 people and
the very next day he saw the newspaper headline “Volcano disaster in Martinique
4000 killed”). I'm with him. I mean, everyone has had dreams that seem
spookily prescient right? Whether that is precognition or just some quirk of
neurology I don't know; but have I always liked the idea that there are things
in the natural world that we don’t perceive properly, and that one nice thing
about humans is that we really want to come up with ideas to explain them i.e.
ghosts, UFOs, precognitive dreams, string theory….

I read
An Experiment with Time a while ago but was reminded of it when I saw an
article in the Times Literary Supplement (issue dated October 31 2014). In
it was published the dream experiment as performed and described by Nabokov in
1964. Like Dunne, Nabokov was a man of scientific interests -- he was a
well-respected amateur lepidopterist -- and also a Freud-denier. Nabokov seems
genuinely open to the experiment and does seem to find some precognitive scraps
amongst his dreams.

Some patches of prose in his dream diary are direct
presentiments of his novel Ada from 1967 (Van Veen, the 'hero' of
Ada, writes a treatise on time, 'The Texture of Time', and describes
his precognitive dreams as "dim-doom visions: fatidic-sign
nightmares, thalamic calamities, menacing riddles. Not infrequently the
menace is well concealed, and the innocent incident will turn out to possess,
if jotted down and looked up later, the kind of precognitive flavour that Dunne
has explained by the action of "reverse memory").

An Experiment with Time was popular in its day. I imagine
earnest undergraduates in 1927 comparing dream diaries and finding thrilling
grains of the future amongst them; or drunken dinner parties becoming suddenly
hushed when prophecies are uncannily revealed. Maybe the real reason for its
popularity was that Dunne’s experiment gave people permission to talk
openly about their dreams (one of the Seven Things You’re Not Supposed To Talk About ).

I wrote about one of my dreams because
Dunne made it okay, and because a few days later something happened that seemed
somehow familiar even as it happened…

Thursday 12 Feb: Early
in morning both rabbits escaped and were running around neighbourhood gardens.
Me and S----- running around like slapstick comedians trying to catch them.
Pedro was having great time helping round them up. Some correlation?
Coincidence? Maybe this relates to dream of 9th ?…Any possible
significance in the fact that rabbit escape was morning after I saw meteorite light
up night sky, before it crash-landed in the ocean?